...not that there wasn't
enough evidence about that already. Oh, and there's this article too, which gives a slightly different twist:
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/
story.jsp?story=634702
New leak shows secret Iraq war plans
By Peter Graff /
Reuters
LONDON - U.S. President George W. Bush and Prime
Minister Tony Blair were determined to topple Saddam Hussein at least nine months before they launched the war in
Iraq, documents leaked in a Sunday newspaper say.
The secret documents could have a late impact in the election
next Thursday, in which Iraq -- and whether the prime minister told the truth about his case for war -- has emerged
as a last-minute issue in the final week of campaigning.
Blair has always maintained that he did not commit to
war in Iraq until after Saddam was given a final chance to abandon banned weapons, and that "regime change" was
never his aim.
But the Sunday Times printed what it said were secret minutes of a top level cabinet meeting
held in July 2002 to discuss Iraq, nine months before the invasion.
According to the minutes, Blair spoke to
his cabinet explicitly in terms of toppling Saddam.
"If the political context were right, people would support
regime change," Blair is recorded as saying. "The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether
we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work."
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said
the case for war was "thin" because "Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than
that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
Straw proposed giving Saddam an ultimatum to allow in U.N. weapons
inspectors, provoking a confrontation that would "help with the legal justification for the use of force."
Spy
chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, fresh from a trip to Washington, had concluded that war was "inevitable" because "Bush
wanted to remove Saddam through military action", and "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".
Blair ordered his chief of defence staff, Sir Michael Boyce, to present him with war plans later that week, the
minutes said.
IRAQ SLOW TO EMERGE AS ELECTION ISSUE
Although many in Britain opposed the war, it has been
slow to emerge as an election issue because both Blair's Labour party and the main opposition Conservatives backed
it.
But the Conservatives have used the case Blair made for war to attack his credibility. And they are hoping
some of the traditionally left-leaning Labour party's supporters will abandon it for the anti-war third party, the
Liberal Democrats.
Polls show Blair is likely to win a third term in the election, although his huge
parliamentary majority may shrink.
But he has been careful to say he believes the result could still be in
doubt. In an interview with the Observer newspaper, Blair warned anti-war voters against making a protest vote.
"There will be people who will feel very, very strongly over Iraq. But if they vote Liberal Democrat in a seat
where the Conservatives are second, it is not policy on Iraq that will change -- it's the policy on the economy, on
the health service, on schools, on the minimum wage," he said.
The Sunday Times document was the second major
Iraq leak to emerge in the final week before the election. Last week Channel Four news leaked advice to Blair in
which the attorney general raised doubts about whether the war was legal.
Blair's Downing Street office
declined to comment on whether the minutes leaked to the Sunday Times were genuine, but said the meeting took place
before the U.N. Security Council resolution that provided the basis for Blair's case for war. "This was before the
decision to go down the U.N. route, and before resolution 1441 on which the attorney general based his judgment," a
spokeswoman said. "The circumstances therefore quickly became out of date."
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
...not that there wasn't
enough evidence about that already. Oh, and there's this article too, which gives a slightly different twist:
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/
story.jsp?story=634702
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
All you have to do is go to the
horses mouth.
Go to the website for "The Project for the New American Century" and do a little search and
you'll see that invading Iraq was decided on by the Neo-Cons back in the mid
90's.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/index.html
For those that don't know, The Project
for... is a PAC created by William Kristol with much input from Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton (ring a bell?), Robert
Kagan, Gary Schmidt.
They spell it out in black and white that they were waiting for a "New Pearl Harbour"
so they can justify an invasion of Iraq.
They did a great job, too. More than 60% of the Ameican population
STILL thinks that Iraq was responsible for 9/11!
The PNAC was actually
discussed in some depth last Summer in this forum, in the "foreign policy of the Bush administration" thread.
But yeah, that's the central philosophical document of Neo-Con foreign policy, no question. For example, the
State of the Union Address was full of this philosophy, but just barely under the surface.
In short, the PNAC
presumes that it's just OK to go and forcibly establish U.S.-friendly (i.e., friendly to U.S oil companies and
other powerful multinational corporations) countries anywhere we want; anywhere that it's in our "best interest" to
do so.
Even a lot of Democrats (notable recently was Bill Maher) try to argue that the "fact" that Iraq is a
budding democracy (...maybe!) justifies our having invaded it. This is PNAC-type thinking. Almost no one outside the
U.S. buys it. But shamefully, a suprising number of folks here do.
Last edited by DrSmellThis; 05-03-2005 at 01:18 AM.
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
Last months issue of “The Ecologist”
had a breakdown of the top ten corporations that are profiting off this occupation.
Lockheed Martin is #1 with
$21.9 billion in pentagon contracts. Their share price has tripled since 2000. Lockheed’s VP, Bruce Jackson, is one
of the founders of PNAC. He also helped draft the Republican’s foreign policy platform for the 2000 presidential
campaign.
We all know about Cheney’s connections to Halliburton. He’s another founding member of PNAC and
Halliburton ranks #4 with $10.8 billion in contracts.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
Give truth a chance.
That was disturbing.
It
will be interesting to hear the spin the British government puts on this. I guess they'll say the Iraqi police were
terrorists.
It's a shame anyone would feel embarrassed about calling a conspiracy a conspiracy. There is no
other remotely logical way to explain our invasion of Iraq, and quite a few other things about this administration.
That's what it was and is. Criminals exist; they are far from nice; and sometimes, they rule countries. It is
eminently reasonable to be suspicious of the neocon motives. As soon as you start looking at it that way, everything
makes sense -- all the facts. That is what separates a cold harsh grip on reality from paranoia.
Having said
that, we do need quite a bit more information on this incident.
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
" Having said that, we do need
quite a bit more information on this incident."
Good luck!!!
Know how to spell cover up??
Remember,
some of the "fringe" articles I posted talked about US troops doing the same thing. What was that old saying about
smoke and fire??
Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.
--Lazarus Long
Neither would surprise me. I keep hoping that the cardinal ruleOriginally Posted by Mtnjim
of conspiracies will kick in. The more people involved the greater the likelihood of somebody talking.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
A number of people have
already started talking and leaking information, as regards the war and Bush being Hell-bent on invading from the
get go. The same goes for Abu-Graib and torture policies. Any number of people have started to talk about that
too.
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/0
2/10/iraq.intelligence/index.html
"Cardinal rule for conspiracies", anyone?The Bush administration "used intelligence not to inform
decision-making, but to justify a decision already made," Pillar wrote. "It went to war without requesting -- and
evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."
[emphasis mine]Though Pillar himself was responsible for coordinating intelligence assessments on Iraq, "the first
request I received from any administration policymaker for any such assessment was not until a year into the war,"
he wrote.
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0
,,1716842,00.html
...Here again, all the evidence points to one conclusion, as expressed in the title of
this thread. By this time, I'm very confident that every scrap of evidence that comes out in the future will say
the same thing:
We. Were. Lied. Into. A. Predetermined. War.
But man, some people are slow to catch
on!
***
Blogger bares Rumsfeld's post 9/11
orders
Julian Borger in
Washington
Friday February 24,
2006
Guardian
Hours after a commercial plane struck the Pentagon on September 11 2001 the US defence secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld, was issuing rapid orders to his aides to look for evidence of Iraqi involvement, according to notes
taken by one of them."Hard to get good case. Need to move
swiftly," the notes say. "Near term target needs - go massive - sweep it all up, things related and
not."
The handwritten notes, with some parts blanked out,
were declassified this month in response to a request by a law student and blogger, Thad Anderson, under the US
Freedom of Information Act. Anderson has posted them on his blog at
outragedmoderates.org.
The Pentagon confirmed the notes had
been taken by Stephen Cambone, now undersecretary of defence for intelligence and then a senior policy official.
"His notes were fulfilling his role as a plans guy," said a spokesman, Greg
Hicks.
"He was responsible for crisis planning, and he was
with the secretary in that role that afternoon."
The report
said: "On the afternoon of 9/11, according to contemporaneous notes, Secretary Rumsfeld instructed General Myers
[the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff] to obtain quickly as much information as possible. The notes indicate
that he also told Myers that he was not simply interested in striking empty training sites. He thought the US
response should consider a wide range of options.
"The
secretary said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time, not only Bin Laden. Secretary Rumsfeld later
explained that at the time he had been considering either one of them, or perhaps someone else, as the responsible
party."
The actual notes suggest a focus on Saddam. "Best
info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH at same time - not only UBL [Pentagon shorthand for Usama/Osama bin
Laden]," the notes say. "Tasks. Jim Haynes [Pentagon lawyer] to talk with PW [probably Paul Wolfowitz, then Mr
Rumsfeld's deputy] for additional support ... connection with
UBL."
Mr Wolfowitz, now the head of the World Bank, advocated
regime change in Iraq before 2001. But, according to an account of the days after September 11 in Bob Woodward's
book Plan of Attack, a decision was taken to put off consideration of an attack on Iraq until after the Taliban had
been toppled in Afghanistan.
But these notes confirm that
Baghdad was in the Pentagon's sights almost as soon as the hijackers struck.
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British
Adviser Says
By
DON
VAN NATTA Jr.
LONDON — In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of
[URL="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo"]Iraq[
/URL], as the United States and
Britain pressed for a second
United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to
Saddam
Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.
But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was
inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister
Tony
Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international
arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr.
Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.
"Our diplomatic strategy had to be
arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote
in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.
"The start
date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president.
"This was when the bombing would begin."
The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the
Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State
Colin
L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a
threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons.
Although the United States and Britain aggressively
sought a second United Nations resolution against Iraq — which they failed to obtain — the president said repeatedly
that he did not believe he needed it for an invasion.
Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum,
which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights
were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international
law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the
memo.
Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's
sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view
of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.
The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a
quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush
predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic
groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.
The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister
acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding
any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal
to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or
assassinating Mr. Hussein.
Those proposals were first reported last month in the British press, but the memo does
not make clear whether they reflected Mr. Bush's extemporaneous suggestions, or were elements of the government's
plan.
Consistent Remarks
Two senior British officials confirmed the authenticity of the memo, but
declined to talk further about it, citing Britain's Official Secrets Act, which made it illegal to divulge
classified information. But one of them said, "In all of this discussion during the run-up to the Iraq war, it is
obvious that viewing a snapshot at a certain point in time gives only a partial view of the decision-making
process."
On Sunday, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said the president's
public comments were consistent with his private remarks made to Mr. Blair. "While the use of force was a last
option, we recognized that it might be necessary and were planning accordingly," Mr. Jones said.
"The public
record at the time, including numerous statements by the President, makes clear that the administration was
continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution into 2003," he said. "Saddam Hussein was given every opportunity to
comply, but he chose continued defiance, even after being given one final opportunity to comply or face serious
consequences. Our public and private comments are fully consistent."
The January 2003 memo is the latest in a
series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president
and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July
2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade
Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its
desire to go to war.
The latest memo is striking in its characterization of frank, almost casual, conversation by
Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair about the most serious subjects. At one point, the leaders swapped ideas for a postwar Iraqi
government. "As for the future government of Iraq, people would find it very odd if we handed it over to another
dictator," the prime minister is quoted as saying.
"Bush agreed," Mr. Manning wrote. This exchange, like most of
the quotations in this article, have not been previously reported.
Mr. Bush was accompanied at the meeting by
Condo
leezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser; Dan Fried, a senior aide to Ms. Rice; and Andrew H.
Card Jr., the White House chief of staff. Along with Mr. Manning, Mr. Blair was joined by two other senior aides:
Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, and Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide and the author of the Downing Street
memo.
By late January 2003, United Nations inspectors had spent six weeks in Iraq hunting for weapons under the
auspices of Security Council Resolution 1441, which authorized "serious consequences" if Iraq voluntarily failed to
disarm. Led by
Hans
Blix, the inspectors had reported little cooperation from Mr. Hussein, and no success finding any
unconventional weapons.
At their meeting, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair candidly expressed their doubts that chemical,
biological or nuclear weapons would be found in Iraq in the coming weeks, the memo said. The president spoke as if
an invasion was unavoidable. The two leaders discussed a timetable for the war, details of the military campaign and
plans for the aftermath of the war.
Discussing Provocation
Without much elaboration, the memo also says
the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month,
neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.
"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2
reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea
to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."
It also described the president as saying, "The
U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to
weapons of mass destruction.
A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a
proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.
Mr. Sands
first reported the proposals in his book, although he did not use any direct quotations from the memo. He is a
professor of international law at University College of London and the founding member of the Matrix law office in
London, where the prime minister's wife, Cherie Blair, is a partner.
Mr. Jones, the National Security Council
spokesman, declined to discuss the proposals, saying, "We are not going to get into discussing private discussions
of the two leaders."
At several points during the meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, there was palpable
tension over finding a legitimate legal trigger for going to war that would be acceptable to other nations, the memo
said. The prime minister was quoted as saying it was essential for both countries to lobby for a second United
Nations resolution against Iraq, because it would serve as "an insurance policy against the unexpected."
The
memo said Mr. Blair told Mr. Bush, "If anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the
stakes by burning the oil wells, killing children or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq, a second resolution
would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs."
Running Out of Time
Mr. Bush agreed that
the two countries should attempt to get a second resolution, but he added that time was running out. "The U.S. would
put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would twist arms and even threaten," Mr. Bush was
paraphrased in the memo as saying.
The document added, "But he had to say that if we ultimately failed, military
action would follow anyway."
The leaders agreed that three weeks remained to obtain a second United Nations
Security Council resolution before military commanders would need to begin preparing for an invasion.
Summarizing
statements by the president, the memo says: "The air campaign would probably last four days, during which some 1,500
targets would be hit. Great care would be taken to avoid hitting innocent civilians. Bush thought the impact of the
air onslaught would ensure the early collapse of Saddam's regime. Given this military timetable, we needed to go
for a second resolution as soon as possible. This probably meant after Blix's next report to the Security Council
in mid-February."
Mr. Blair was described as responding that both countries would make clear that a second
resolution amounted to "Saddam's final opportunity." The memo described Mr. Blair as saying: "We had been very
patient. Now we should be saying that the crisis must be resolved in weeks, not months."
It reported: "Bush
agreed. He commented that he was not itching to go to war, but we could not allow Saddam to go on playing with us.
At some point, probably when we had passed the second resolutions — assuming we did — we should warn Saddam that he
had a week to leave. We should notify the media too. We would then have a clear field if Saddam refused to go."
Mr. Bush devoted much of the meeting to outlining the military strategy. The president, the memo says, said the
planned air campaign "would destroy Saddam's command and control quickly." It also said that he expected Iraq's
army to "fold very quickly." He also is reported as telling the prime minister that the Republican Guard would be
"decimated by the bombing."
Despite his optimism, Mr. Bush said he was aware that "there were uncertainties and
risks," the memo says, and it goes on, "As far as destroying the oil wells were concerned, the U.S. was well
equipped to repair them quickly, although this would be easier in the south of Iraq than in the north."
The two
men briefly discussed plans for a post-Hussein Iraqi government. "The prime minister asked about aftermath
planning," the memo says. "Condi Rice said that a great deal of work was now in hand.
Referring to the Defense
Department, it said: "A planning cell in D.O.D. was looking at all aspects and would deploy to Iraq to direct
operations as soon as the military action was over. Bush said that a great deal of detailed planning had been done
on supplying the Iraqi people with food and medicine."
Planning for After the War
The leaders then looked
beyond the war, imagining the transition from Mr. Hussein's rule to a new government. Immediately after the war, a
military occupation would be put in place for an unknown period of time, the president was described as saying. He
spoke of the "dilemma of managing the transition to the civil administration," the memo says.
The document
concludes with Mr. Manning still holding out a last-minute hope of inspectors finding weapons in Iraq, or even Mr.
Hussein voluntarily leaving Iraq. But Mr. Manning wrote that he was concerned this could not be accomplished by Mr.
Bush's timeline for war.
"This makes the timing very tight," he wrote. "We therefore need to stay closely
alongside Blix, do all we can to help the inspectors make a significant find, and work hard on the other members of
the Security Council to accept the noncooperation case so that we can secure the minimum nine votes when we need
them, probably the end of February."
At a White House news conference following the closed-door session, Mr. Bush
and Mr. Blair said "the crisis" had to be resolved in a timely manner. "Saddam Hussein is not disarming," the
president told reporters. "He is a danger to the world. He must disarm. And that's why I have constantly said — and
the prime minister has constantly said — this issue will come to a head in a matter of weeks, not months."
Despite
intense lobbying by the United States and Britain, a second United Nations resolution was not obtained. The
American-led military coalition invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, nine days after the target date set by the president
on that late January day at the White House.
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
According to an administration official, Iraq
appears to have been Cheney's primary foreign policy concern immediately after the 2000 election, to the virtual
exclusion of other issues in early administration briefings: Here is a direct video link, regarding Cheney's pre
9/11 jumpstart on
Iraq:
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Hardball-Sands
3.wmv
Here is an alternate link, where you have to scroll down a little
bit:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/03/28.html#a76
93
For those curious about the facts and details surrounding the early planning for the Iraq war, I again
recommend the book, "Lawless World", by David Sands.
And for a little more historic perspective, here is the
neocon letter written to President Clinton demanding immediate military action to implement regime change in Iraq.
It was signed by current administration members Richard Armitage
John
Bolton, Donald
Rumsfeld,
and Paul Wolfowitz. It demonstrates that their intention to invade Iraq goes
back to at least 1998. I was reminded of it again, as someone was passing it around my
gym:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclinton
letter.htm
Last edited by DrSmellThis; 03-28-2006 at 04:01 PM.
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
Ex-CIA agent says WMD
intelligence ignored Reuters
Fri Apr 21, 5:39 PM ET
The CIA had evidence
Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction six months before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion but was ignored by a
White House intent on ousting Saddam Hussein, a former senior CIA official said according to CBS.
Tyler
Drumheller, who headed CIA covert operations in Europe during the run-up to the Iraq war, said intelligence opposing
administration claims of a WMD threat came from a top Iraqi official who provided the U.S. spy agency with other
credible information.
The source "told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs,"
Drumheller said in a CBS interview to be aired on Sunday on the network's news magazine, "60 Minutes."
"The
(White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer
interested," he was quoted as saying in interview excerpts released by CBS on Friday.
"We said: 'Well, what about
the intel?' And they said: 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change'," added
Drumheller, whose CIA operation was assigned the task of debriefing the Iraqi official.
He was the latest former
U.S. official to accuse the White House of setting an early course toward war in Iraq and ignoring intelligence that
conflicted with its aim.
CBS said the CIA's intelligence source was former Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and
that former CIA Director George Tenet delivered the information personally to President George W. Bush, Vice
President Dick Cheney and other top White House officials in September 2002. They rebuffed the CIA three days
later.
"The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the
policy," the former CIA agent told CBS.
U.S. allegations that Saddam had WMD and posed a threat to international
security was a main justification for the March 2003 invasion.
A 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, to which the
CIA was a major contributor, concluded that prewar Iraq had an active nuclear program and a huge stockpile of
unconventional weapons.
No such weapons have been found, however, and U.S. assertions that they existed are now
regarded as a hugely damaging intelligence failure.
But Drumheller, co-author of a forthcoming book entitled "On
the Brink: How the White House Has Compromised American Intelligence," rejects the notion of an intelligence
failure.
"It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it's an intelligence failure," he told CBS. "This
was a policy failure."
Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is
expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or
delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights
reserved.
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
The Supreme Court has ruled 5-3 that
Bush exceeded his powers with Guantanamo Bay and the military tribunals there.
Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.
--Lazarus Long
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